Today’s environment demands that companies in Bedford, Texas have reliable Internet service in order to run their business. The business functions of every company, whether it is a small organization or on the Fortune 500, from Fortune 500, depends upon fast and reliable access to The web.
Our reliance on access to the internet will become greater in the near and distant future.
From email to data sharing, video chat to VoIP, and data archiving to Internet commerce, the Internet is ubiquitous. What is the best fix to meet your needs? Will a cable modem be adequate? It could be that you need Metro Ethernet. Gigabit Internet may satisfy your needs. A 5 Meg Internet circuit, 10 Meg Internet access, a 50 Meg circuit, or a 100 Meg Internet access point: what is right for your company in Bedford, Texas?
The needs of your particular company must be determined before you can select an appropriate service. Are surfing the web and sending email the only uses of the net? Will Internet usage mainly involve cloud servers and real time data connection? You may be hosting the data in Bedford, Texas and remote locations rely on this.
How would an outage to your high-speed Internet affect your business? What about the downtime that results? Can your company afford that? Is the absence of uptime detrimental? These types of questions must be answered before you make purchase anything.
In the broadest of terms, companies need high-speed Internet access. Deciding on the right broadband internet is not easy. It requires a thorough cost-benefit analysis. Don’t be distracted by terminology. While you may hear providers throw out words and phrases like:
… the real issue is understanding what capability and technical solutions best meet your needs.
At any company in Bedford some employees, if not all employees, need some type of access to the web if they are to properly perform their job duties. It may be needed for company research, to order office supplies or other reasons.
Perhaps the size of your work force may determine the solution that best fits your needs. If you have a smaller workforce, you may do fine with a smaller Internet circuit. For example, if you only employ a handful of people, a 5 or 10 Meg circuit may meet your needs. If your business has nearly 50 people, however, and they all need to use the net at the same time, you may find that more is better.
Your workforce may simply use an intranet system with limited video and graphics. If this is true, your need for high speed Internet be less than you thought. If your organization functions demand the downloading of documents and images or videos on a regular basis, speed becomes a must more important issue.
Do you perform backups at your company? If, as recommended, you conduct remote backups from every single desk, you will need to support simultaneous connections out to the web. This will allow you to sync your backup data.
Are you using Google drive, DropBox or another file sharing service? This is how a file sharing service works: You save a file. Then the file is pushed to the cloud, and is then synchronized with other people’s computers. In order to ensure that all of your functions work properly, in addition to file sharing, you must have sufficient bandwidth.
Your business location may cause you to think about high-speed business Internet access such as Metro Ethernet and/or gigabit Internet. These can usually be found in Bedford in “lit buildings” that have already been wired. The ease and affordability of adding high-speed Internet to your office may surprise you.
Absent the need to introduce Metro Ethernet into a new building, it is not particularly costly to connect Metro Ethernet to a suite or office within that building. Depending on availability, it is often possible to obtain high-speed Internet access with Metro Ethernet or gigabit Internet in 30 days or less.
Does your company host its own servers? Does your company use the hosted servers to run data feeds, APIs or websites for offices or businesses located elsewhere? Maybe your organization requires that dozens of satellite offices have access to a hosted application at your company main headquarters. Are you a retail organization with 10, 000 stores? Do you host the POS system for all of them? Are you a law firm? Do you host data for three or more external locations?
When data, programs, or information is hosted centrally, those outside your office must gain access. For those people, no Internet connection means no work gets done. If you need multiple connections to function at the same time from many different places, make sure that your intranet solution can reliably support it.
The needs of an office with one employee web surfing may not need more than a cable modem or an inexpensive 5-10 megabyte circuit. For the headquarters, high-speed Internet access including Metro Ethernet, gigabit Ethernet or other high-speed dedicated circuits is advisable. While high speed is great, you also need support for your multiple diverse connections. A cable modem would likely not provide the necessary support.
In some situations, there is a high price to pay for bringing in an inexpensive circuit or cable modem. While the monthly rate is lower, the bandwidth is generally shared among other tenants. If you subscribe to a cable modem with a 30-megabyte connection, you would expect to always be able to reach that high speed. However, it is possible that during peak hours, you won’t. Cable companies are known to limit or predetermine the amount of bandwidth available for delivery in any particular community. Different buildings and tenants housed or working within those buildings all share that set amount of bandwidth. While you may be capped at a 30 Meg speed, you may never be able to reach that speed during organization hours. Is this a problem for you if you expect 30 and get 6?
Guaranteed bandwidth and dedicated bandwidth are solutions that some providers offer. In this situation, your bandwidth is not shared but is fully allocated to your business. Regardless of other tenants in your building or neighboring buildings, you should receive the full capacity of your circuit.
You can receive guaranteed bandwidth with Metro Ethernet. You can receive it in increments of five, 10, 50 or one hundred megabyte circuits. Want to reach gigabit speeds? You can by using a gigabit Internet provider.
In these situations, each tenant receives their contracted high-speed. The carrier delivers enough so they can split their circuit and provide enough to each tenant.
Realistically, while some providers in Bedford, Texas offer excellent Internet bandwidth products, it is possible for a circuit to go down. What can you do to minimize the chance that you will experience an outage of some kind?
Redundant circuits may be the answer for you.
Redundancy basically comes in two forms.
With the first type of redundancy, you receive multiple circuits from the same carrier. Redundant circuits can help protect against certain problems. They can mitigate the inconveniences when there is a failure of a physical line or a problem with the port into your router. Even multiple circuits can fail, such as in the event of a large-scale carrier outage or when there damage to an external line. This offers some protection and assurance but does not eliminate all threats.
In the second type of redundancy, you bring in circuits from two different carriers. These connections can be bound together so they act and appear to the public as a single circuit. Using particular routers and IP address allocations, no one would be able to tell that you have multiple providers or circuits. In fact, they are totally redundant and separate. Diversity redundancy offers far greater protection. If one carrier has a widespread issue, you have a carrier that will still be alive.
When considering redundant circuits and carriers, try to be sure that the carriers you look at in Bedford have different physical geographic routes or pathways. Doing so will maximize redundancy. Basically this means that you want your circuits to enter your building on different sides or paths. The circuits would be attached to telephone poles (or underground conduits) in different directions leading to different data centers or central offices. By doing this, if there is a significant problem such as a fire at a data center, you have redundancy in an alternative physical direction.
It is true that Internet access costs you money. However, the cost does not come close to what you will pay if the access that is not reliable. Consider the following:
You are on a cable modem with the carrier providing circuits to 14 other tenants in your building. It is possible that during normal organization hours, those tenants might be downloading large files or watching continuous videos. They might be getting a lot of phone calls. As available bandwidth shrinks, what will happen to your calls? How will it affect the quality of that telephone call? Maybe calls will randomly drop? Will you sound muffled or choppy to your customers?
You may be an accounting firm that shares databases, a retail chain company utilizing a point of sale system or a law practice sharing files. Regardless of the specifics, your office is the hub for your enterprise. Every single one of your offices, stores and locations rely on you and your primary Internet connection to retrieve data. What happens in the event of a circuit failure? Would it cause mere annoyance or utter disaster? Are your other offices able to do any work? What about new orders? Circulate essential files and data? Picking the right a solution can be difficult. Before doing so, be sure you fully understand your requirements. Maybe your software company runs a hosted solution. Maybe that hosted solution is used by hundreds of your customers. You may operate a service like this: other systems communicate with yours via an API to figure out freight rates, stock prices, to compile weather data or receive any other information that you provide. What if these other systems have difficulty connecting your servers? Will your customers remain loyal to you if they have to withstand multiple outages?
Does your company completely rely on the internet? No outbound calls can be made should your circuits go down. There would be no way to answer incoming calls of people trying to reach your representatives. Basically, you are out of organization. Is redundancy enough? Many of the finest call centers with the best reputations already understand and use redundancy. They should consider if they have sufficient protection. Can you truly rely on your carriers? Are they as dependable as they claim? Do you consistently get quality service that provides clear and reliable calls?
It should be clear by now that you have many different options to select from. Your organization budget and needs will play a large part in your decision-making. To recap:
You are probably not thinking about redundancy if you have a small business with a single location. In this case, you can probably get by with a single Internet access circuit of 5, 10 or 50 meg. For an office in a lit building, you may find that gigabit service or Metro Ethernet are affordable options for you. Speak with our engineers about what is right for you. Prices vary with location and circuit availability.
If you have a midsized company in Bedford, Texas, you will need higher-speed access to The net. Your options are Metro Ethernet, gigabit Internet and higher speed circuits. In a perfect world, you will achieve maximum redundancy by utilizing multiple carriers to provide and service different circuits. It is sometimes possible to reach this without adding ridiculous costs. For instance, it may be cheaper to utilize two 50 meg circuits in place of one 100 meg circuit. Again, costs vary. Availability also varies. Learn your options by speaking with one of our knowledgeable experts. We can help you determine what is available in your specific location.
If your company has several sites or offices, you are at great risk for failure. Redundancy is crucial. Having several providers would afford extra protection. You can decrease risk during downtime by having redundant equipment as well. Have you looked at Metro Ethernet providers, gigabit Internet providers and other high-speed Internet access circuit providers? You should do so before making a decision. The correct combination of providers and services can keep your organization running smoothly and efficiently.
To run efficiently and effectively, corporations and businesses that fall into this category must use point-to-point high-speed Internet circuits, gigabit Internet circuits and Metro Ethernet circuits. Having redundant hardware as well as redundant circuits from different providers will ensure your needed uptime. You need enough bandwidth. The bandwidth must be sufficient to handle spikes in usage with no slowdowns or interruptions. Be sure to have the right circuits and hardware. They both must be able to support multiple, fast, concurrent connections.
Your business faces great risk of less than adequate bandwidth and failing circuits. Your demand and budget constraints should both be considered when you decide what circuit or combination of circuits you must have. There is tremendous pressure on you to choose the best combination of circuits and hardware.
Our engineers will take the pressure off and develop a free action plan for you by analyzing your needs. You want your company to run smoothly. We’ll look at your current usage levels and demand levels and design a plan that meets your needs at a cost that makes sense for you.
Please complete the contact form by clicking here. You may also call our office to set up an appointment for your assessment. We do assessments quickly. It can take as little as 48 hours to complete your analysis.